I finished Vessel by Lisa Nichols in just under 48 hours, partly because it is concise and briskly paced, and partly because the plot was that engaging. I’ll do my best not to give away the twists and turns of the plot, as their discovery is one of the book’s pleasures. The setup is that astronaut Catherine Wells has returned to Earth after a nine year absence, the sole survivor of a interstellar mission written off as a complete loss years earlier. She has no recollection of the critical portions of her journey, and thus cannot explain where her crewmates are, why she was gone for so long, and how she got back. Naturally, more is revealed over the course of the book, and while I enjoyed the steady pulling back of the curtain on the cosmic mystery, some of the very human observations stood out to me the most.
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